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Techweek LA played host to about a dozen panel discussions yesterday, but one in particular pulled in a large audience. Industry experts James Borow of Shift, Matt MacNaughton of PromoJam and Teal Newland of StumbleUpon hashed out the evolving nature of content marketing and native advertising within social networks.
VP of Global Revenue & Marketing at StumbleUpon, Newland started off by noting Web 2.0 has changed the origins of Internet content. “It used to be the 10 – 90 rule. 10 percent of users created 90 percent of the content,” said Newland. Now that rule has been totally flipped on its head. Internet content is more and more user-generated.
In this user-generated world, classic paid advertising doesn’t cut it anymore. The most important part of content marketing and native advertising in Web 2.0 is “sincerity” said Borow, Founder and CEO of Shift. And that is because the person-to-person content generated on social networks like Facebook and Twitter is "sincere" in its nature, so for advertising to be successful it also needs to appear "sincere," a concept not always well understood by advertisers who are used to talking at their audience.
This ‘What to do with social media?’ problem is also something that trips up content providers. Social media can be a great way to drive people to content and inject real-time value but driving people to social media as if it were the content itself can be a dead-end. Teal said users' reactions when StumbleUpon sent users to various social networks went something like this: “Why are you sending me to Facebook or Twitter? I came here because I wanted to get away from that and discover something new!”
The panel said Twitter Cards had solved this problem well, while embedded Facebook posts hadn’t. Twitter Cards can add dynamic content value to your webpage, while not requiring a reader to leave, however, Facebook’s embedded post are static and “just sends you right back to Facebook,” said Borow.
The next challenge for native advertising and content marketing is a vanishing act: “Snapchat creates a unique challenge for advertisers because the content literally disappears,” Borows said. This unique format may require advertisers to think even harder about the context in which they provide their content. However, Borows noted: email is very similar to Snapchat in that it disappears from a user’s attention rather quickly. Yet, “email is still a very effective tool for marketers.” Perhaps, Snapchat won’t be such a challenge after all.
Day 2 of Techweek LA starts today at noon. You can find more on that HERE.
